Six weeks after the press conference, the Blackwood Consortium headquarters was quiet in the way that only expensive, well-built offices can be quiet, where the silence itself feels like it costs something. Julian sat at his desk on the forty-second floor with Eleanor's letter open in front of him, his coffee cooling at his right elbow and the city spread wide and indifferent outside the floor-to-ceiling windows behind him. He had read the letter twice already, slowly both times, and now he was reading it a third time without quite realizing it. She wrote about a woman named Priya. She wrote about a housing application and a bureaucratic error and three days of fighting a system that had not been designed to move fast for people like Priya. She wrote about what it felt like to win something small and completely real, and her handwriting changed somewhere around the third paragraph, loosening slightly, as if the memory of it had relaxed something in her hand. Jul

The waiter poured water into two crystal glasses and left the room without being asked, which told Julian that Gerald Harrington Senior had used this particular private dining room many times before and that the staff understood his preferences without needing instruction. Small detail, worth noting. Gerald let the silence sit for a moment after Julian settled into his chair, the way a man sits in silence when he is used to other people filling it nervously. Julian did not fill it. He picked up his water glass, took one measured sip, and set it down, and looked at Gerald with the same open, patient expression he might have given a client presenting early design sketches. Gerald smiled first. It was a good smile, practised and warm at the surface, and completely without warmth underneath, the kind of smile that had been refined over decades of meetings where the goal was to seem reasonable while being anything but. "I app